It took two more days until Pirin could stand upright again. When he could finally move his arms, he heaved himself up out of the cot and examined his bandages. They were clean and fresh, and though the skin below was still weeping, it wasn’t bleeding as badly as before.

  But he still couldn’t see out his left eye.

  It was nighttime when he descended down to the gondola. Only Brealtod was still awake. He held both the ship’s wheels in place, keeping them steady and level as they flew over the forests and abandoned farmland of the Sirdian countryside.

  Crops clung to fields half-harvested, farmsteads lay abandoned, and small cities—the few they passed—were packed. If they had a curtain wall, or even a wooden stockade, civilians gathered to wait out the invasion.

  By Pirin’s best guess, they were heading due west—directly toward the island of Kerstel. They still had a few days before they arrived.

  “It looks like you fixed Gray,” Brealtod said in his language of hisses and clicks.

  Pirin gave a shaky nod. “We…did it together. She overwhelmed the dragon, and for now…it seems like it’s locked down for good.”

  He approached the curved bank of windows at the front of the gondola, then stared into his candlelit reflection. A bandage wrapped around his head, blocking out his left eye and covering the damaged flesh.

  But if it had just been a bandage covering his eye, there’d still be some light slipping through.

  Nothing made it through. It was blank.

  He’d healed his face enough that he could pull away the bandage. He unwound it carefully, then bunched it up in his hands.

  A red scar ran down his face from the center of his forehead down to his left cheek, and it crossed right through his eye. Instead of the usual blue, his iris was a pale, milky white, with a slightly darker gray pupil.

  It…was gone.

  He touched the scar gently, mouth gaping in disbelief. “Brealtod…?” he asked.

  The dragonfolk hissed affirmatively.

  “It’s not gonna heal up, ever, will it?”

  “No,” Brealtod hissed, and Pirin translated the sounds. “It will not.”

  “Not even when I advance to Wildflame and reforge my body in Essence once more? That was supposed to be a result of the last phase of the advancement.

  “An injury like that?” Brealtod shook his head. “Wizards cannot heal severed limbs or deep scars. They may fade, but never fully heal—especially once they’ve affected your perception of your own form.”

  Pirin chewed his bottom lip. “Myraden’s scars healed.”

  “They were small, surface level.”

  “This isn’t?”

  “An Unbound Lord did that to you. It will leave a lasting impression.”

  Pirin exhaled and sighed. His lip trembled. He was going to be missing an eye? If anyone got on his left side, he’d be at a serious disadvantage. Not to mention the awkward discomfort of just not being able to see.

  He shut both his eyes, and it stung. It stung horribly, physically, but also deeper, like his Essence channels were protesting the movement as well.

  It would take some getting used to, but he couldn’t let this get in his way.

  But he did need to rest.

  ~ ~ ~

  Lord Three jumped through the mountains as far as he could, pushing off stone ledges and heaving himself through the air. He didn’t have enough Essence to lift himself and fly after the elf’s airship, and even jumping, he couldn’t consistently travel faster than them.

  But neither could he return to Lady Neria empty-handed.

  No. The elf would be back. And Lord Three had to be ready to crush him once and for all.

  He stopped on a shelf high up in the mountains, cycling to dissuade the cold, and folded his legs beneath himself, before shutting his eyes and drawing in the Eane.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The encounter with Nomad had bled his centuries-old reserves of Essence dry, and he hadn’t recovered from it yet. He likely wouldn’t ever reach the same Essence levels, have a core so full, so saturated.

  But if he wanted to last in a long battle against Nomad’s apprentice, he’d need to stock up.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Featherflight sailed over Sirdia’s west coast the next morning and flew out over the Adryss ocean. In a few days, they’d reach Kerstel.

  Pirin had been focussing on his revelations, but he hadn’t made any significant progress. No resonance, nothing that sounded right. Just meditation, swirling around aimlessly, but without a proper target or an easy solution.

  When there was no sign of the coast, and instead, an empty field of water rushed by beneath the Featherflight, Pirin searched for Nomad. The former wizard wasn’t in the gondola or the crew quarters, now in the cargo hold with Gray.

  Probably on the viewing platform, then. There wasn’t much room to hide, and with the lookouts and soldiers disembarked—they’d stayed with the rest of the army after Dremfell—there was no one else to get in the way.

  Pirin climbed up to the observation platform and opened the hatch, and sure enough, Nomad sat cross-legged at the very front. A chilly autumn breeze washed around him, and as high as they were, snowflakes swirled down before melting on the sun-warm airship envelope or viewing platform.

  Pirin was about to climb back down the ladder—no need to interrupt an old man’s meditation—when Nomad said, “Wait, Pirin.”

  Pirin froze halfway through shutting the hatch, then pushed it open all the way. “Yes?”

  “You say that like I’m the one asking for you, yet you came up here to talk to me, correct?”

  “Well…” Pirin pulled himself all the way up through the hatch and approached Nomad. The man held his raccoon-cat in his lap—his former Familiar—and ran his hand through its thick fur. He wasn’t meditating at all. Or, at least, not doing any of the things a wizard with a still-functional Essence system did.

  “How did you know it was me?” Pirin asked. “Is your magic returning? Or your spiritual senses, at least?”

  Nomad snorted. “You have a different cadence of footsteps, Pirin.”

  “...Oh.”

  “When you get older, you notice those sorts of things. Or simply when you begin looking for patterns, and have nothing else to rely on.”

  “Are you…dying?” Pirin asked. Nomad still only looked in his late thirties, maybe mid forties. But, being a wizard, he would’ve been truly much older than he looked. “You don’t look like it.”

  “Without my magic, my years are catching up to me. I reckon I’ll only last a few more before I finally pass on.”

  Pirin rubbed the side of his face. With the enhanced healing his body afforded him, the most gruesome of his scars hit over, and from a distance, no one should’ve been able to tell his left eye wasn’t functional. No one except himself. Up close, they’d notice the single vertical scar and the misty eye, but he’d rather not wear a patch.

  “Nomad, sir?” Pirin asked. “I’ll need to fight on all angles, tackling all fronts. I can’t do that with half my vision blocked.”

  “Blocked?” Nomad shook his head. “You must use your other senses.”

  “Sound and…touch? And smell? That can only go so far.” And even then, the harder Pirin tried to concentrate, the more his body wanted him to use his eye. He knew it was there, and he was supposed to see out it. But he couldn’t. It gave him a headache if he concentrated too long, and sometimes, it was better to let everything fall blurry again.

  “Your sixth sense. Your spiritual senses.”

  “It’s not good enough to see with…” Pirin whispered.

  “That’s because you’re thinking of it purely as sight. You must sense how the Essence flows around you. You must look for the impressions all objects make in the Eane.” Nomad stood up, and his former Familiar climbed to his shoulder. “You discovering your Reign so soon shows me you have an aptitude for feeling the Eane. You have deep roots, but you must use them. Blindfold yourself.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me. Blindfold yourself. Don’t rely on your eyes until we arrive at Kerstel. Navigate the ship with your senses.” Nomad tapped his foot on the platform, alerting Pirin to the location of his presence. But Pirin hadn’t known precisely where he was until before then.

  “But my senses work better at picking up danger, right?”

  “No,” Nomad stated. “That is what the Dominion teaches. They’ll convince you to see everything around you as a threat, and that, in order to use your senses properly, you must perceive the entire world as a threat to your existence.”

  “There’s another way?”

  “There’s more than one base instinct, no? Danger is one, and can be helpful, but there’s also love, joy, indignance, curiosity, ambition, and so on. You must rely on your instincts, trust your gut, and understand how your surroundings make you feel. You are a part of the world—know it, trust it, and cling on to it. Only then will you truly perceive your surroundings, and when you overcome this scar, you’ll be more powerful than any other wizard around you. Or, at least, your senses will be.”

  Pirin nodded, then said, “I’ll blindfold myself when I go down to the crew quarters. Now…one more question.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need to reforge my sword. I can’t face the Unbound without it.”

  “And you can’t reforge it without losing your Reign.”

  “So…either I get used to the stump of the sword, or glue it back together with a weaker steel and have it shatter upon first use?”

  Nomad snorted. “There’s a third option. I grew up in a Seisse-Plainspar bordertown, at a boarding academy, and even in the shelter of a wealthy sector of the city, we had a tradition of preserving shattered dishware. We’d use an ichor-clay grout and piece together shards of broken mugs. The grout was sturdier than the material of the dish itself, but moreover, with the ichor, they had the potential to become low-grade artifacts. The same effect could apply to your sword—it was simply a mortal swordsman’s, but it could become more. Problem is, we don’t have any ichor.”

  Pirin shook his head. “Yes, we do.” He tapped his void pendant. “But it was forged into steel to craft Lady Neria’s control dagger.”

  “You’d use it?”

  “I could turn something evil into something with purpose? Of course.”